Collaborative Research: Supporting Newcomer Socialization in Online Production Communities

这项研究的目标是(1)了解如何向维基百科这样的在线生产社区招募志愿者并将其社会化；(2)设计流程和工具，作为社会化的一部分，帮助新来者寻找信息；(3)建立流程和工具，支持社会化的人际过程，包括同伴指导和与更资深社区成员的指导。在线生产社区正变得越来越重要，因为他们正在创造驱动互联网的软件，产生有价值的科学数据，并建立历史上最大的百科全书。面对不可避免的更替，每个在线社区都必须吸收一代又一代的新来者才能生存。新来者是内容、劳动力、新思想和受众的来源。然而，吸引新来者并将其纳入现有社区可能是困难的。社会化是向新来者传授在群体中扮演角色所必需的行为和态度的过程。社区提供了各种社会化策略。来自线下组织的研究表明，组织使用制度化的社会化策略和新人积极的信息寻求有效地提高了新人对组织的承诺、满意度和生产率。然而，这些策略在网络社区中并不常用，而且在使用时似乎产生了不同的效果。这项研究的发现将扩展现有的群体和组织社会化理论，主要基于自我报告测量的研究结果与基于行为测量的研究结果相补充，并通过提供关于在线社区社会化的证据，在网络社区，对新来者的限制与在线下截然不同。这项研究将开发解决新来者社会化的重要问题的过程和工具，将在维基百科新来者社会化的背景下进行评估，特别是在心理科学协会的维基百科倡议中进行评估，该倡议旨在提高心理学文章的科学质量。这些工具将免费提供给其他科学协会和其他更广泛的在线生产社区。该项目支持NSF的使命，即通过改进维基百科作为传播心理学科学知识的工具，并开发一个模型，说明其他科学学会如何与维基百科或类似努力合作，更好地产生和评估面向公众的最新和准确的科学信息。它将直接涉及许多大学生，他们将被分配撰写或改进心理学文章；他们将从更广泛的社区获得关于他们表现的反馈。因此，它直接支持心理科学的教与学，并将有助于增加学生对其科学协会的参与。

The goals of this research are (1) to understand ways of recruiting and socializing volunteers to online production communities like Wikipedia, (2) to design processes and tools that assist the newcomers' information-seeking as part of their socialization, and (3) to build processes and tools to support the interpersonal processes of socialization, including peer mentorship and mentorship with more senior community members. Online production communities are becoming increasingly important, because they are creating the software that drives the Internet, generating valuable scientific data and building history's largest encyclopedia. In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Newcomers are a source of content, labor, new ideas, and audience. However, attracting and incorporating newcomers into existing communities can be difficult. Socialization is the process of teaching newcomers the behaviors and attitudes essential to playing their roles in the group. Communities have available a variety of socialization tactics. Research from offline organizations shows that organizations' use of institutionalized socialization tactics and newcomers' active information seeking are effective in increasing newcomers' commitment to the organization, their satisfaction and their productivity. However, those tactics are not commonly used in online communities and seem to have different effects when they are used.This project pursues theory-guided design. The findings from the research will extend existing theories on socialization in groups and organizations by supplementing findings primarily based on self-report measures with ones based on behavioral measures, and by providing evidence on socialization in online communities, where constraints on newcomers are radically different than they are offline. The research will develop processes and tools for solving important problems of newcomers' socialization, which will be evaluated in the context of socializing newcomers in Wikipedia and especially in the Wikipedia initiative of the Association for Psychological Science, which seeks to improve the scientific quality of articles in psychology. These tools will be made freely available to other scientific associations and other online production communities more generally.This project supports NSF's mission to inform the public about science by improving Wikipedia as a vehicle for disseminating scientific knowledge about psychology in particular, and by developing a model for how other scientific societies could partner with Wikipedia or similar efforts to better generate and assess scientifically up-to-date and accurate information meant for the public. It will directly involve many college students, who will be assigned to write or improve psychology articles; they will get feedback from the broader community on their performance. As such it directly supports teaching and learning psychological science and will help increase students' involvement with their scientific societies.